Fictocritical Writing

In  the  postwar  evolution  of  white  Australian  masculinities,  the  icon  of  the  well-tanned surfer emerged as an alternative to the rural ideal of the farmer  battling against the harsh and unforgiving landscape. This implicit devaluing  of the settler narrative of terra nullius across urban Australia coincided with  contradictory  developments,  including  the  spread  of  countercultural  hippie  sentiments,  the  struggle  to  establish  men’s  surfing  as  a  profession,  and  the  early development of men’s movements that ranged across the conservative- progressive  continuum  in  terms  of  the  gender  relations  they  advocated  and  critiqued.  Friction  between  these  imperatives  complicated  the  relationships  between  Australian  men  and  their  individually  configured  masculinities.  In  the  socially  conservative  milieu  of  white  men  on  the  beach  competing  for  access  to  the  best  waves,  the  combative  economies  of  shortboard  surfing  intensified  those  pressures.  Gendered  representations  of  surfing  in  literature,  primarily  focusing  on  the  2004  Sean  Doherty  biography  MP: The Life of Michael Peterson, and other media are examined to explore the consequences of these tensions for gendered self-understandings.

Keywords:  white,  Australian,  masculinities,  shortboard,  professional  surfing,  Michael Peterson, MP, homosociality

In an age where displacement and dislocation are a common place, McKenzie Wark sets out to make the best of it. In Dispositions, he creates a way of writing that can create a sense of belonging while remaining outside of the markers of a reliable identity, whether in terms of nation, profession, gender or genre. Walking a fine line between the essay, the memoir, fiction and the prose poem, Dispositions creates a nomadic geography that can find its way across the space of both the city and the space of the text. Wark reimagines Australian writing as a 'minor literature', traversing the world in its own way. As Mark Amerika says: "Dispositions reads like a philosophictional codework that samples vocabularies, manipulates meanings, and mixes discourses. Wark's tele-nomadic GPS blog style is an anti-memoir you won't forget."

In this paper I have cut up and rearranged stories from my first attempt at writing and theorising sudden memoir. Here I discuss the ways that writing sudden memoir blurred the lines between how things were and how they became once they were forced into sentences. To do this I thread excerpts from those sudden memoirs in amongst the ideas of theorists I was reading at the time and my current thinking around nonfiction practice.

The construction of this paper involved salvaging small fragments from the stories I wrote last year. In this work I trace the disintegration of my relationship with the person whose life was most tangled up in my writing. Here I have made new the writing that gave away too much. In the place of those short stories, I have sewn together a broken narrative which reflects the fragmentation I have experience in my writing practice. The argument is accumulative, it is just a shift, a twist in perception over time.

Watch the video: https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/15044/roaming-assembly-26%C2%A0-gerrit-haas-artful-fictocritical-writing

Abstract:
While the name ‘fictocriticism’ was coined at the fringes of the 1990s’ Canadian art scene, the in-between practice it designates kept evolving at the margins of the Australian academy, where combined creative writing and literary theory units encouraged artful experimentation with speaking positions critical of generic academic writing. This brief introductory talk focalises key strategic features of the fictocritical.

(Delivered on 1. December 2019 in Antwerp, Belgium, at the Dutch Art Institute's Roaming Assembly #26 "Not a Neutral Conduit: Fictocritical Approaches in Artistic Research" which was convened by David Maroto and documented on video by Baha Görkem Yalim. Further details, more presentations and performances, as well as full credits, can be found at: https://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/14207/2019-~-sunday-december-1-roaming-assembly-26-~-not-a-neutral-conduit )

This is an essay about the fictocritical concept of a 'space between' the categories of literature and criticism, and the relationship of this metaphorical space to the institutional places in which fictocriticism circulates. The 'space between' refers to a space created by the epistemological collapse of critical distance in postmodern theory, a textual no-man's land in which a generic intermingling and hybridity of form takes place. Fictocriticism, however, could perhaps best be described as a term around which a number of theoretical and institutional negotiations between the creative and the critical take place. Rather than offering a single authoritative definition of the term, I will attempt here to describe how fictocriticism is constructed out of an ongoing series of provisional self-definitions.

This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Bibliographic Society of Canada at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Calgary, Ab. on 30 May 2016.

A creative critical examination of the archive, both material and digital, and the relationship between reader, place, and text within the context of archival research.

Artykuł stanowi komentarz na temat dwóch książek: "Fikcje jako metoda. Strategie kontr[f]aktualne w pisaniu historii, literaturze, sztukach" (red. Małgorzata Sugiera, Kraków 2018) i "Performanse pamięci w literaturach i sztukach" (red. Mateusz Borowski, Kraków 2020) oraz przemian we współczesnych badaniach historii sztuki i kultury. Obie prace łączy eksponowany w nich wątek historii kontrfaktualnej i znaczenia fikcji w rozbrajaniu spetryfikowanych, częstokroć narzuconych wizji przeszłości. Autorka artykułu skupia się na tym zagadnieniu, nawiązując do krytyki retorycznych schematów dyskursu historycznego i jego obiektywistycznych iluzji; niemniej jednak broni „zobowiązania prawdziwościowego” jako elementu pracy badawczej. Jak argumentuje, artystyczne działania kontrfaktualne stanowią alternatywną postać badania i odkrywania, angażującą odmienne formy przekazu, i świadomą roli zapośredniczeń. Jako formy pracy z pamięcią, z przeszłością warunkującą teraźniejszość, z tym co wyparte i zapomniane, poszerzają one i aktywizują historyczną świadomość, umożliwiają krytyczną rewizję społecznych wyobrażeń.

Experimental writing published in The Arrow Maker no. 2. March 2017.
The Arrow Maker is a semi-regular journal for new writing including text and image work across genres edited by Ruth Höflich and Isabel Waidner and published by 8fold, occasional small press as digital edition.

This paper is a long adaptation of one initially given  at the 2015 Lectures Féministes at Paris 8. The English was printed while the French read aloud. It proposes a Slash fiction of Joanna Russ's "Female Man", called [xxx] — an alternative, potential universe erupting between the choices made during translation.

For all its advances, Social Science is still methodologically constrained in its capacity to incorporate lived subjectivities into its discussions of sexuality. Auto/biographical writing tends to be used to illustrate analytic categories, rather than as a form of analysis in its own right. `On Not Getting It' is a ficto-critical discussion of available speaking positions for the narration of sex, gayness and middle age. It embodies theory in the reflexivity of the narrative form and uses tropes of touch, lighting, body hair, anger, grief, distraction and pleasure to query the foreclosure of sex that occurs in narratives of good health.

This article deploys a cut-up technique borrowed from the haunted, fictocritical writing of Anna Gibbs. Taking descriptions from parts of different haunted houses found in short stories of the female gothic, it reconstitutes a new house, that is both an architectural assemblage and a reading of the figure of the haunted house as it relates to both gothic studies and feminism. The article has been divided according to passages describing different rooms as they appear in stories by thirteen women writers of the Gothic era: Charlotte Riddell, Mary Wilkins-Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Nesbit, Emma Frances Dawson, Madeline Wynne, Florence Marryat, Mrs Oliphant, Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Bowen, Ellen Glasgow and Edith Wharton. The original paper, delivered at the 2015 Conference Haunting in Short Fiction and Its Adaptations at the University of Angers, was accompanied by a hypertext, choose-your-own-adventure-style Powerpoint presentation in which conference participants could select different doors and passageways, each leading to a different route, reading their way through the collaged house in an itinerant fashion. The rooms and architectural features, with their accompanying passages and readings, are here presented in a linear fashion.

This research explores the practice of art writing in terms of the production of tactical subjectivity. Instrumentalised by the market and knowledge economies, art writing has found itself in a precarious and compromised position. This thesis posed the question, what would constitute a tactical art writing practice? How it might resist such pressures and self-determine in free and non-inscribing ways was explored through consideration of the work of Georges Bataille, Chris Kraus, Michel de Certeau, Janet Frame, Paolo Virno, Wilhelm Reich, Avital Ronell and Chantal Mouffe. It proposes ficto-criticism, liquidity, anonymity, collectivity, multiplicity, passivity, suicidal tendencies and wrong durations as tactical traits of writing in proximity to art.
Originally part of a MFA by research project thesis (University of Auckland 2009), this work was published in 2012 in Endless Lonely Planet vol. 2, a publication project run by Melbourne artist Christopher G. Hill.

Call for Reader-Performers:
Fictocriticism, creative critique, and other possible letters

An approach that combines creation and critique, such as fictocritcism, or les textes possibles, implies a letting go. As others and elsewheres given through words resist our attempts to stack, seize, count and order, the body of language moves with and through, a fungible body contaminating/contaminated with other bodies. As this ordering process is let go, or escapes, the bodies of language are set free to create, to sculpt new mobile objects that erupt in the writing process itself. Texts inspire more texts. The speaking subject is a cacophonous chorus. Discourses are not closed unities but porous potentialities. This is what we call doing research through the writing process.
We are seeking, for two study days at the Université Paris 3 (Sorbonne-Nouvelle), papers, or projects in languages known or unknown that propose to do something rather than to speak about something. In particular we are looking for new strategies of creative critique: of narrative imaginings (Sophie Rabau, Pierre Bayard), or theoretical ones (Avital Ronnell, Anna Gibbs), textual manipulation or appropriation (Anna Gibbs, Kathy Acker), constraints (Craig Dworkin, Clare Hemmings), creative or queer translation (Outranspo), theory that mixes with other discourses, like poetry (Audré Lorde, Cherríe Moraga), mixes languages (Gloria Anzaldúa), or research that combines creation with other domains of the research. That said, a creative approach also means a surprising one, one that is not preordained to fulfill the criteria of success. Please send us something that tries something different.

Deadline to submit proposals: February 14th, 2016
Event dates: June 30 – July 1, 2016
Please send proposals to: lecteursperformeurs@gmail.com
The study day will take place at the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Organizers: Sophie Rabau, Lily Robert-Foley, Marie-Jeanne Zenetti



Appel aux lecteurs-performeurs

Les unes ne peuvent lire sans fourrer leur nez dans les recoins du texte, refont les œuvre comme d’aucun refont le match, lisent en auteure, en prenant sa place et disent ce qu’ils auraient fait, elles si elles avaient écrit le texte, l’écrivent donc sans pour autant cesser de le lire. Les autres sont des lecteurs qui ne restent jamais à leur place ou ne restent pas en place, mettent les mains dans la pâte ou les pieds dans la fiction, s’y glissent comme personnages, interviennent dans l’histoire, y jouant tour à tour les flics de fiction,  les écuyers de héros en perdition, voire les premiers rôles après avoir évacué les personnages qui croyaient présomptueusement être au centre de l’histoire. D’autres encore, ailleurs, répètent le texte mais pour mieux le transformer, s’en distancier, le contester, le déplacer, tandis que certains inventent en théorisant des œuvres inconnues, impossibles peut-être, à moins qu’ils n’inventent la théorie en écrivant si bien qu’on ne sait plus trop s’ils théorisent, inventent ou lisent ou tout à la fois. Encore ailleurs on est plus sage en apparence tout au moins et l’on se contente de contempler  les infinies manières dont on lu, savamment, les textes jusqu’à présent, mais c’est pour mieux s’en emparer et faire de nos sages commentaires de merveilleux jouets propres à écrire et à inventer.
Les unes sont en Australie, les autres à Paris et leurs environs, à New York ou encore ailleurs où nous ne savons même pas qu’elles existent. Les unes se disent fictocritiques, d’autres lecteurs interventionistes et d’autres noms encore : commentateurs rhétoriques, théoriciens des textse possibles, pluralisatuers de textes, théoriciens spéculateurs. Ils ne se connaissent pas tous, mais quand ils se rencontrent souvent se reconnaissent, devinent comme un air de famille  dans cette façon de lire pour faire, pour inventer, pour dire sans pour autant cesser de partager ce je et le corps qui le porte, pour écrire, dans cet espoir d’inventer sinon une méthode du moins une manière partageable avec d’autres de lire en faisant, en disant je, en inventant, en écrivant ou pour écrire. Parce qu’ils ne se connaissent pas mais souvent se reconnaissent, nous voudrions qu’elles se rencontrent, se reconnaissent ou pas tout à fait, et puissent en discuter, puissent parler également  parlent de leurs perspectives, de ce futur encore à écrire qui accompagne leur lectures et leur relation aux textes.
Peu importe donc comment se nommeront et se classeront (ou ne se classeront pas ou se déclasseront) ceux qui répondront à cet appel : ils peuvent être traducteurs potentiels, théoriciens des textes possibles, fictocritiques, lecteurs interventionistes, poélecteur, spéculateurs de textes, lecteurs postextuels et d’autres noms encore que nous ne connaissons pas. L’essentiel serait surtout de se retrouver non pas pour lire en lisant, mais pour lire en faisant, de nous regarder faire et de nos actes de lecteurs tirer encore un ou plusieurs futurs où nous ferons encore.
Nous appelons tous les lecteurs performeurs qui se reconnaîtraient, au moins partiellement, dans cette perspective à nous proposer leur lirécriture pour cette journée dont il pourrait même naître quelques textes encore non écrits.

Date limite pour l’envoi des propositions: le 14 Février, 2015
Date des journées d’études: 30 Juin – 1 Juillet
Les propositions sont à envoyer à lecteursperformeurs@gmail.com
Les journées d’études auront lieu à l’Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Organisatrices: Organizers: Sophie Rabau, Lily Robert-Foley, Marie-Jeanne Zenetti